years
"Howl" provides plenty of instances of this. See also, for instance, the line "who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom" (52), with a reference to Hinduism (in vegetarianism) which clearly connects to spiritual aspirations.
130). This naked, mystical consciousness was to be induced through whatever means possible - madness, criminality, sexual indulgence, drugs, exhaustion, ner- vous collapse, directionless travel, free-form musical improvisation, or the Beats' own spontane
This is a central point. Criminality and madness are means to get to a consciousness which is spiritual in nature.
lyrical celebrati
I would say that this is particularly central to the Beat movement, and can be seen not only in the authors' literary outputs but in their lives and lifestyles as well. In fact, the Beats were often very closely associated to marginal figures and criminals, for instance to Herbert Huncke (who is believed to have first put forth the term Beat) and Neal Cassady, and some, like Burroughs, directly adopted a rather criminal lifestyle, or one which included social exclusion and marginality.
rg 1984: 108). The turn to marginal figures such as Huncke and Cassady is because of th
I would add that the Beats were fascinated by criminals (a category which includes drug users and prostitutes) as much as they were by people afflicted with mental health problems or considered "insane" by society. These are two types of the people marginalized by society with whom they associated and who they praised.